Many accounting textbooks state that the opportunity cost of idle fixed assets is zero. A few exceptions refer to repair, overhaul, employee vacation and congestion, giving rise to positive opportunity cost. We show that in important and frequently encountered situations, idled assets have...

This paper presents a framework to help decisions makers better measure the opportunity cost of resources with different granularity. We characterize resources by the intrinsic lumpiness of acquisition (acquisition granularity), storability of benefits (expiration granularity), and control over...

Many accounting textbooks state that the opportunity cost of idle fixed assets is zero. A few exceptions may refer to factors such as repair and overhaul, employee vacation and congestion that give rise to strictly positive opportunity cost. We show that in important and frequently encountered...

Using a setting in which an employer seeks information about talent in order to achieve a proper match between talent levels and tasks, we provide a comparative analysis of two performance evaluation systems widely used in practice ― an absolute performance evaluation system (APE) and a...

We examine a principal-agent setting in which the principal uses a performance measurement system for multiple purposes to provide incentives and for retention decisions. The principal chooses the nature and extent of bias in the system, which determines whether the performance report is...

Screening talent to appropriately assign tasks among agents is an important organizational decision. In this paper, we compare the efficacies of absolute and relative performance evaluation systems in identifying agent talent when information asymmetry is present. We identify conditions under...

We examine the principal's preference for a public predecision information system that produces a signal about a parameter of the firm's production function. We show that the discreteness of action space plays a crucial role in establishing the principal's preference for suppressing the release...

We examine the value of assigning costs of capacity resources to products for capacity planning. It is often argued that a product's full cost, which includes such assignments, is a measure of its long-run manufacturing cost. Hence, full cost is viewed as an appropriate basis for deciding...

Using theoretical analysis and simulation experiments, we examine the usefulness of full costs for product pricing. We show that full costs are economically sufficient for pricing when a decision-maker (DM) jointly solves the capacity planning and pricing problems, and has enough discretion in...